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Re: Installing Debian on a Qube 1



* Jim Cheetham <jim@iNode.co.nz> [2004-10-07 12:07]:
> Assuming that you don't have time to tarball for a Qube 2700

I've generated a tarball now.  I don't have a Qube without serial
console to test, but it doesn't show any console output on my Qube2 so
hopefully it will work!  Instructions are below.


Preparing the hard drive
========================

Take the hard drive out of the Cobalt machine and put it into any PC.
First, you have to partition the disk.  You *need* a /boot partition as
hda1 as type ext2 revision 0 and a / (root) partition as hda2 as type
ext3.  The installation will by default try to mount swap from hda5 and
home from hda6 but that can always be changed.  The layout I had was the
following (which is the default "desktop" scheme debian-intaller will use
on Cobalt):

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1         207       97776   83  Linux
/dev/hda2             208        2842     1245037+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3            2843        8912     2868075    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            2843        3216      176683+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda6            3217        8912     2691328+  83  Linux

Use fdisk to partition your disk (let's call the disk hdc1 for now,
assuming that you put it on the 2nd IDE controller in your PC).  Make sure
that at least hdc1 is labled as a Linux partition (type 83).  Now format
the drive:

% mkfs.ext2 -r 0 /dev/hdc1
% mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdc2

Mount the disk somewhere:

% mount /dev/hdc2 /mnt
% mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt/boot

Create /home and /proc which are missing

% mkdir /mnt/proc /mnt/home

Downloading and installing the Debian base system
=================================================

Download the compressed base system (about 57M).  This contains a basic
system with a basic set of package of sarge as of 2004-10-13.

% wget http://people.debian.org/~tbm/cobalt/base.tar.bz2
% wget http://people.debian.org/~tbm/cobalt/base.tar.bz2.asc

Verify that the GPG signature matches:

% gpg --verify base.tar.bz2.asc base.tar.bz2

In this base, I have made the following modifications:
 - changed /etc/inittab so it won't use ttyS0
 - patched /etc/init.d/rc and /etc/init.d/rcS so it will show status
   information on the LCD panel

Now untar this system onto the drive:

% cd /mnt
% bzcat ~/base.tar.bz2 | tar -xvf -

Boot the system
===============

Put the hard drive back into the Cobalt and boot it.  It will automatically
load CoLo from disk which will then boot a kernel and start Debian.  You
should see the services on the LCD panel as they are started.  The system
will try to obtain an IP address via DHCP on eth0.  SSH is installed and
remote root logins are allowed.  The password is "root".  There are no
users yet.

What to do now
==============

You have have a working system.  There are a few things you should do,
though:

 - change the root password
 - add normal user accounts
 - regenerate the SSH key (since the private key is included in the base
   system on my web page)
 - Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and use a Debian mirror close to you and
   then type: apt-get update

-- 
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/



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